Six Months

I was looking today at this picture that our friend Mark quietly took at the hospice, just hours before Greg passed. I hadn't really been able to look at it until now, but I was glad that it was there, knowing it was stored somewhere on my phone or computer. When I was looking at it today I was surprised to see how intertwined we were. I vividly remember that day, being there next to him. I remember the hours. I remember how bizarrely peaceful and warm it felt. I kept brushing his hair back. There are things about being so familiar with someone that you don't even realize you know, like the thickness of the hair on their scalp or the direction their hair grows right above their temples. But I didn't remember his hand on mine or his hand on my thigh. But it now seems to be such a perfect picture of us. We were always that intertwined and it wasn't dramatic or obvious or even thought about, we didn't even really have to try that hard. It was just easy. Falling in love and living with and staying in love with and growing in love for Greg as the years passed, was the easiest thing. We would have conversations about this. Wondering why it was so easy for us -marriage- not in a boastful or prideful way, but in a really humbling way. We had sat with and walked with many friends for whom marriage was not easy or even seemingly enjoyable at times, and with some friends who just couldn't make it work and felt their pain. We knew the vast complexities of being joined together with another sinner from sun up to sun down. We had our share of arguments that lasted until 4am and hurt feelings and just simply being really annoyed at each other. But at the end of the day, reconciling and coming back together was not difficult. Being together was always better. I don't know why it was so easy.

At the beginning, you read and hear a lot about the mystery of "two becoming one." What you don't hear anything about is how in the world you untangle that oneness after till death do you part. It's not easy. Pronouns aren't easy. I'm constantly hearing myself say "we" or "us" and I don't know how or when I switch it to "me" or "I". I don't even know what's accurate. Filling out forms isn't easy. Identifying as a widow is not easy. Carrying in sleepy kids and luggage late at night after a roadtrip is not easy. Lugging out to the alley the well-worn crib that you no longer need to keep around is not easy. Trying to figure out how to sing all the songs you would sing together, by yourself, is not easy. Being now just one of the two isn't easy.

The past six months have been the beginning of the untangling. Trying in the mess of things to figure out what's left after your other half isn't there. Are you half of yourself? It feels like it sometimes. I'm not who I was before I was with Greg, but I'm not who I was with him, either, as much as I would like that. There's a grieving not only for him, but for us, for me. I miss who I was with him. His love for me was a daily picture of God's love for me... freedom to try things I would normally cower from, freedom to cry, freedom to be horrible, freedom to fail, freedom to be ridiculous. I felt more myself with Greg than I had ever known myself apart from him.

The hardest conversation we had at the hospital just a few days before he passed was weeping together, knowing that our time together was coming to an end. This oneness that we had shared and known, though so dim in comparison to the mystery of being one with Christ and going home to be with Him... it was all we had ever known and what we had treasured as an unmistakably undeserved gift. The thought of it coming to a close, even to be replaced with a greater joy, was unfathomable and bitter, because the reality of it had been so beautiful.

In this untangling of us (because I can't live there forever and I know he wouldn't want me to), I'm finding that grieving him is more about making room in my life for it, more than it is a process or some time-fixed thing. There will just always have to be room in my life for missing him. And some days there needs to be more room in it than others. And in each new day, there's also, bizarrely, life happening. There's laughter and new stories. There's new successes and accomplishments, new failures and new embarrassing moments. There's all of the life that I wish he was here for. But even with him not here, it's still happening. It's the most absurd of things, that life still happens. Some days I don't want it to. I just want everything to stop, because he's not here for it. But I guess that's the biggest mystery of all, the light in the darkness. And all at the same time, I don't get it AND I profoundly do, because it's buried there somewhere in the core of me, underneath all the rubble and the muck, by the grace of God.